Perhaps politics could become a contest about who has the better ideas, rather than whose are more dangerous.
Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

There’s a dirty little secret at the heart of the Australian body politic, one that it doesn’t really serve anyone to admit lest it force everyone to change the way they go about their business.

Be they leaders trading off fear of change, oppositions fomenting dissent, lobbyists and advocates seeking to promote their cause or journalists trading in conflict, it’s best to sweep it under the carpet.

But this week’s Essential Report blows the whistle on the deceit that fuels the outrage industry: contrary to the noise in Canberra, we Australians are basically a pretty happy bunch.

On a range of indicators life may not be perfect, but it is much more good than bad. In terms of “happy in my life overall” the positives break seven to one, with even stronger numbers for personal/family life and not much less for social life.

Yes, the numbers saying we are happy in our spiritual life drops into the fiftieth percentile, but the numbers which say we are spiritually bereft are so low they only just register.

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The only area where there is less than a majority of Australians saying they are happy is in their work life, a sure sign that the impact of contract work and casualisation and the well-documented decline in real wages is biting. But even here, dissatisfaction is hardly rife, with just 17% of respondents identifying as unhappy in their work life, and just 5% saying they feel this strongly.

Dig deeper, and there are some interesting happiness trends. It seems the older you are the more likely you are to identify as being very happy across the segments, the wealthier too. The figures also show there been a slight decline in happiness since we asked the question in mid-2017, but again this is a decline off a high base rather than a fall from positive to negative territory.

There are indeed a group of Australians, about 10% of the population, who are not happy with how things are working out for them. This is not to diminish their experiences; indeed any Australian who is living an unhappy life is one too many and their plight should rightly have the attention of our leaders.

But it does provide some context to the fight club that is the national parliament, where the government of the day is attempting to cling to power by whipping up cascading panics on immigration, cyber-espionage, marauding students, assaults on religious freedom and whatever outrage turns up next.

The Left for its part are just as want to tap into outrage. Anger sits at the centre of union organising theory; fear of environmental catastrophe drives climate campaigns; the profit motive is inherently malign.

All this venom feeds a media hungry for relevance, where the artillery fire of conflict provides a staccato of urgency to the daily news cycle that is loud enough to break through the white noise of information overload.

And the louder the politicians all shout, the angrier they all become, and the less relevant they all seem to anyone living a normal, predominantly happy, life.

So how would politics play out if we were to accept that the Australian electorate were, by and large, a contented lot with the good luck to be living in one of the wealthiest nations one earth at the wealthiest point of human history?

Perhaps politics would become a contest about who has the better ideas, rather than whose are more dangerous. Maybe the problems of a complex society would be seen as challenges to be overcome, rather than proof of incompetence.

So if my findings are true and people are basically happy, why doesn’t our politics reflect this? I have a couple of theories.

The first is driven by the way political parties take in information. The loudest voices are those with a grievance, whether it be an unhappy constituent or an activist branch member or a disaffected stakeholder, grievance motivates engagement.

This is amplified by the public focus groups that political parties run, where respondents are regularly invited to tell us what their “issues” are. The entire feedback loop is set up to find the negative “issue” and build a replicable narrative around it.

But more fundamentally, the two party system is predicated on conflict, and conflict requires protagonist and antagonist. Without either there is no conflict and therefore no politics. When people say they are sick of the old parties fighting, maybe this is what they are railing against. The shift on the conservative side to the Independents, a group of basically optimistic, centrist women could be a sign of a desire to better reflect their own positivity.

Is their hope of breaking this cycle of false unhappiness in the lead-up to the federal election? Let me give the happy optimist’s scenario a try.

The federal government, if it could only stop setting fire to its own body parts, would be basing its case for return around the strong economy, driving economic growth and unemployment. It would recognise that its primary challenge is to share that wealth more evenly rather than wage the next battle of its war with organised labour. If they could just turn down the volume, there is a world where it could convince Australians that things are going OK.

For its part, the Labor Opposition would recognise that what the Australian people are really after is a bit of hope for the long-term, rather than a fresh airing of grievances. Interestingly, as the Coalition’s circular firing squad has been hogging the limelight in recent weeks, this is exactly what Bill Shorten has been doing, releasing a swathe of policy on ways government can improve everything from energy to early learning, social housing to science, even a plan for contemporary music.

Little of this work has made the headlines, but its brew of optimism is percolating far from the madding Canberra crowd. The politics of a fundamentally happy society will never match the excitement of the politics of grievance but it is a national resource ready to be tapped.